Reformed Millennials - Learn Earn and Invest

About Reformed Millennials - Learn Earn and Invest

The Reformed Millennials Podcast covers a wide ranging topic arc focusing on Sports and Investing. RM Pod is dedicated to identifying the latest trends in technology, sport and investing. We discuss the ways Millennials can leverage these trends to better invest their time, fandom and money. reformedmillennials.substack.com (https://reformedmillennials.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Reformed Millennials

Category

business · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Feb 2020

Latest episode

29 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

89 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Oct 2026

   Don’t Player Hate, Participate: Why AI Pessimism Is a Luxury Belief

   I fixed the sink… That’s the whole story, honestly. There was a drip under the kitchen sink, I took a photo of it, asked the thing what I was looking at, and then I fixed the thing. No plumber. I know that confirms a few priors about me, but I bring it up because that little win did more to change how I feel about this technology than any essay I’ve read. You can sit around complaining about AI. You can keep telling everybody that software is dead. Or you can actually participate. Learn how to use the technology. Pay attention to the companies benefiting from it. And when the stock market starts rewarding those companies, don’t be afraid to own them. The tape Rough month. The market stopped trading AI and started trading AI against the cost of money, and both can and are true at once. The 10-year has spent most of October above 5% and closed Tuesday a hair under it. Midterms are next Tuesday. Everybody is nervous and nobody can tell you exactly why, which is usually what nervous looks like. Then Anthropic filed its S-1 on Monday. Press reports have it raising around $100 billion at a valuation near $2 trillion, which would make it the biggest IPO ever. Revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Revenue in the second quarter of 2026 alone was $11.6 billion. Third quarter, by the company’s own math, was about $16.8 billion. Nobody has grown like this before. Revenue per employee is over $6.6 million. Ninety percent of their code is now written by their own model. Two things I pulled out of it. First, this company spends most of its compute on research and training, not on serving you and me. The CFO has said that publicly. The part that serves customers is extremely profitable. The part that builds the next model is where the money goes. Which tells you that for the next 12 to 18 months, demand for chips and power isn’t slowing down, because you only stay in this race by spending. Second, the market is right to be twitchy about the multiple. Growth slowed from roughly 147% quarter over quarter to about 45% in Q3, and that’s a real slowdown, not just big numbers getting bigger. OpenAI shipped a model in September that matched or beat theirs and some of the revenue followed. The harness turned out to be less sticky than people hoped. Meanwhile, token prices keep falling and GPU rental prices keep rising, which is a strange thing to watch at the same time. SemiAnalysis has about 50 gigawatts of new data centre capacity coming online in 2027. When that lands, rental rates come down, and then we find out what intelligence actually costs. My read: Is that the aggregate demand across every model, open and closed, is the number that counts, and its really difficult to account for. Anthropic going public is the first time we get a clean look at any of it. I think that’s bullish for the sector short term and medium term. The other datapoint from the week was Microsoft offering a voluntary exit package to about 60,000 people, roughly 27% of the company. Highest-paid workforce on earth. That’s the efficiency showing up in the numbers, and it’s scary if you work there, and it’s exactly why we dedicated the rest of the show to Cognitive Mercantilism... say that fast 3 times. Cognitive mercantilism, explained. Venkatesh Rao published an essay on Saturday called Cognitive Mercantilism. I sent it to about 20 people. Mel had already read it… because of course she did. I want to lay it out carefully because it’s the best frame I’ve found for why the loudest AI pessimists are the people with the most degrees or the most “intelligence”. Mercantilism is what came before capitalism. From roughly 1500 to 1800, if you asked a king or a general or a landowner how an economy worked, they’d tell you something like this. Wealth is a fixed pile. It’s land, gold, silver, and the labour of the poor people who work that land. The point of policy is to grab more of the pile: more territory, a trade surplus, more bullion in the vault. My gain is your loss. Rao’s twist, is that mercantilism was never the philosophy of merchants. It belonged to the aristocrats and the military and the people collecting rents. The actual traders and the people starting businesses were the ones pushing against it the entire time. Capitalism from that push. Under the surface, mercantilism needed four beliefs to hold: * Wealth is scarce and finite. * Ordinary people can’t be trusted with freedom. They’re unruly and need managing by their superiors. * Supply is everything. Control the productive stuff, charge high prices. Demand from the poor doesn’t count because the poor have nothing to spend. * Most people are only good for farming. With 80% of the population in the fields, that looked like the natural order of things. What broke it was demand. Rao leans on the historian Joyce Appleby here. Capitalism wasn’t inevitable. It showed up when people discovered that wealth could be created and not only captured, and that ordinary people could also be customers of production. When a farmer could suddenly want tea and a clock and a window with glass in it, he worked more to get them. Days worked per year went from around 250 to 300. Nobody forced these ppl to work more... Desire did the persuading and the effort followed that desire. Markets got pulled into existence by the wanting. Now swap the word “wealth” for “intelligence” and you have our modern ai conundrum. Cognitive mercantilism treats intelligence as a fixed resource that lives in credentialed brains, to be hoarded, kept expensive, and handed out by approved custodians. And the same four beliefs apply here. * Intelligence is scarce. * Regular people can’t be trusted with powerful tools. * Supply of that resource is everything, so we MUST “control the frontier” because its too dangerous. * And most people are only good for whatever they’re doing now. And who holds this cognitive worldview today? It sure as heck isn’t the plumbers. It’s the people who spent their lives going to school, hoarding intellegence so they could sell it at a higher price. These folks tend to have their entire identity and income wrapped up in owning intelligence and selling it. Doctors, lawyers, consultants, advisors, academics, the media, and yes, the fronteir labs themselves. So it follows that the technocrats building this think it’s the end of the world. They’re the aristocrats in this story. A technology that makes intelligence cheap and abundant hits them exactly where mercantilism hit the landowners in 1780. They’re losing control of their scarce thing. An electrician who started using it to bid jobs and write invoices and run his own estimating does not see it that way. He sees a tool that let him do something he couldn’t do last year. Those two people are not going to agree about AI, and it’s not because one of them is ignorant. Mel put it in economics terms. Think of a production possibility frontier, the curve of everything an economy can make with the resources it has. Most policy is arguing about where on the curve to sit. This moves the curve. That’s a different kind of thing. She also made a point I’ve been chewing on since our chat... Opposition to AI is turning into a luxury belief, the same way being anti-energy did. If you already have enough wealth and security that you don’t need more, you may struggle to understand why anyone would want a tool that helps them get more. And every society needs an elite of some kind. The thing capitalism does well, and the thing this technology does well, is lower the barrier to becoming one. A few caveats we should point out. The Engels’ Pause was real. Between 1800 and 1840 output per worker in Britain rose something like 46% while real wages rose about 12%. The gap went to the people who owned the machines. The handloom weavers didn’t get retrained, they got wiped out. Wages only caught up when the technology spread into enough industries to create new work and when the institutions changed: unions got legalized, the vote got extended, the Corn Laws got repealed. If people today believe the gains will flow to five companies while they eat the disruption, their pessimism is rational, not ignorant. The honest path to optimism runs through access to cheap tools, ownership of the companies that benefit, and real support through the transition. And the question people ask themselves matters. “Will this take my job?” is a mercantilist question. This question assumes there is a fixed amount of work to fight over. I think the better question is “what can I want now that I couldn’t before?” That’s the question that turned subsistence farmers into consumers, and I think it’s the one that turns knowledge workers from producers of intelligence into directors of it. People hate losing an identity. But i’d be willing to bet that people would be much more open to gaining one. Rao ends the piece with: We may be at the beginning of a shift as big as farming to industry, from a world where 80% of human brains are busy with subsistence cognition to one where 95% are free to go satisfy wants nobody has even thought of yet. The most important thing about the agricultural revolution wasn’t that farming got more efficient. It’s that most people got to stop farming. The political theatre Alberta voted and 74.9% said stay. Not close. The other nine questions were close... The five on immigration and public services all passed with between 52% and 58%. The four on the Constitution, picking our own judges, abolishing the Senate, opting out of federal programs with the money, provincial law winning in provincial areas, all failed, with yes between 42% and 47%. Mel’s read is that no question got a decisive answer except the one everybody was watching, and that calling the people who voted yes on one through nine names is bad politics, because there’s a lot of them and they’re spread across NDP ridings too. I don’t have much to push back on. We’re not polarized, or we are, depending on which chart you look at. Either way the conversation isn’t over. BC is the one I was actually excited about. David Eby called an election two years early because the Conservatives had just dumped their leader and he figured he’d catch them on the ground. Instead they won a majority, 64 of 93 seats on about 48% of the vote. Eby’s out. Lorne Doerkson is premier-designate, and he’s already on record supporting Pacific Link and a second pipeline to the coast. Two more things. Bill C-264 was debated in the House Wednesday. It’s a Conservative private member’s bill to repeal the tanker ban on the north coast, and Poilievre wrote to Carney on Monday asking him to support it. Between that and the Impact Assessment Act heading back to the Supreme Court, the two pieces of legislation that have done the most to keep Canadian energy in the ground are both in play. If you’re an Albertan, that’s about as good as a fall gets. Canada - its time to build Every country in the world wants compute, and compute wants energy, and energy is Canada’s biggest export. I don’t think it’s an accident that the map just went blue from the Pacific to Quebec with one orange spot in Manitoba. Mel’s version is Maslow: no voter in history has voted against their economic interest to the point of undermining their own food and shelter, and governments that forgot the base of the pyramid are finding this out the hard way. Capitalism is doing what it does. When enough people want something, the system gives it what it needs. So don’t player hate. Participate. Fix the sink. Nothing here is investment advice. I own positions in some of the companies and sectors discussed and those positions change without notice. Do your own work. Sources * Venkatesh Rao, Cognitive Mercantilism (https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/cognitive-mercantilism) * Anthropic S-1 on EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002130357/000162828026067168/anthropicpbc-sx1.htm) * Anthropic Q3 revenue and growth (https://www.implicator.ai/anthropic-tells-investors-q3-revenue-hit-16-8-billion-as-growth-slowed-to-45/) * Microsoft buyout offer to ~60,000 employees (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-offers-buyouts-to-around-60000-employees-reports-say/) * Revenue per employee, Anthropic vs the Mag 7 (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/anthropic-makes-more-per-employee-than-every-magnificent-seven-company-but-nvidia-171110780.html) * SemiAnalysis, Datacenters 2027 (https://www.theneuron.ai/news/semianalysis-data-center-forecast-2027/) * The PHP flaw and the 70% figure (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/22/whats-the-php-coding-flaw-that-could-pull-down-70-percent-of-the-internet) * Ben Thompson, The End of the Internet (https://stratechery.com/) * Alberta referendum results (https://www.todayville.com/final-referendum-numbers/) * BC election results (https://opendatacanada.ca/articles/bc-election-2026-results) * Doerkson on pipelines (https://globalnews.ca/news/12084816/bc-ndp-lower-gas-costs-bc-conservatives-embrace-pipeline/) * Bill C-264 and Poilievre’s letter (https://www.conservative.ca/conservative-leader-calls-on-liberals-to-support-tanker-ban-repeal/) * PBO Economic and Fiscal Outlook, October 2026 (https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/news-releases--communiques-de-presse/parliamentary-budget-officer-releases-economic-and-fiscal-outlook-october-2026-la-directrice-parlementaire-du-budget-publie-les-perspectives-economiques-et-financieres-doctobre-2026) * Budget 2026 scheduled for November 5 (https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2026/10/government-of-canada-to-release-budget-2026-on-november-5-2026.html) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com (https://reformedmillennials.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Bankruptcies, sold-out datacenters, and a vote to stay in Canada

   Delta raised fares about 20% from a year ago and nobody stopped flying… Premium revenue was up 18% last quarter. Ed Bastian’s explanation was blunt: the top 40% of American households are “nearly $40 trillion wealthier than they were just a few years ago.” However, that same economy eating airfare increases produced 372 large US company bankruptcy filings in the first half of 2026. That’s the most since 2010, and one more than the same stretch last year. Two years running. We have Zombie companies and we have breakthrough technology businesses. What we need to start asking ourselves as investors: Does this mortgage, this rental, this stock still work if money costs 8%? The tape We recorded Tuesday morning. The S&P 500 closed that day at 7,805, a fraction under the record it set on October 6th. The Nasdaq sat at 27,204. Small caps kept sliding. Bonds are the story. The US 10-year touched 5.36% last week, the highest since 2002, and closed Tuesday around 5.2%. The Fed’s September minutes said another hike “would likely be appropriate by year end.” Brent is above $105, with a hurricane shutting in most of the Gulf of Mexico’s output. Earnings season opened with JPMorgan missing for the first time in 17 quarters. Goldman’s revenue was up 23%. Korea’s market fell 5.5% on Tuesday after Chinese memory maker CXMT announced a denser DRAM design, and SK Hynix dropped 10% in a day. Under an index near its highs, by one count 134 S&P 500 stocks are down 40% or more from their peaks. The average stock is not having the year the index is having. We grew up on cheap money Mel and I came into adulthood as rates were falling. If you bought in Canada in 2016, 2017 or 2018 you borrowed at 3% or 4%, and every renewal looked cheaper than the last. Then COVID took rates to zero. A whole generation, mine included, learned that 2% to 4% was normal. What we need to come to terms with is that period was the exception, not the rule. The better mental model now is 2003 to 2014, not 2016 to 2024. Central banks aren’t trying to juice growth anymore. They’re trying to hold down prices in an economy that, in the US at least, is running extremely hot. Somebody who financed a rental at 2.75% five years ago is renewing at something closer to 4.75% or 5.25%. That cost goes to the tenant. The tenant has less left at the end of the month. Multiply that across the country and you have the next ten years of Canadian politics: rent, groceries, and whether anyone under 40 can buy anything. Mel made the uncomfortable point on the episode. Prices only cool when demand falls, and demand falls when people can’t afford things. In her words, what we’re trying to accomplish “doesn’t always come in the packaging of what we want.” There’s exactly one painless fix, and it’s abundance. More homes, more power, more of whatever is scarce. Every other fix is a decision about who gets hurt... Into the end of the year, The Bank of Canada will probably sit still. September jobs came in at minus 68,300, unemployment hit 6.5%, and the loonie touched an 18-month low. The odds of a hike this month fell to about one in four. That’s the good news, and it isn’t very good. Ottawa’s ban on foreign buyers of homes also expires January 1st, and the government has to decide what to do with it. The great extension In the zero-rate years, a lot of companies borrowed cheap and pushed their maturities as far out as they could. They didn’t fix anything. They bought time. Those maturities stack up from 2028 and peak around 2031. You can see where it’s cracking first. Fitch has private credit defaults at a record 6.1%. In office, 71% of the distressed CMBS balance is tied to a refinancing that failed or is about to, per CRED iQ. The buildings pay their bills and still can’t roll the loan. Telus cut its dividend 55% in July to pay down debt. Meanwhile high-yield spreads sit around 3.1%, close to the tightest they’ve ever been. Credit markets are relaxed. B ankruptcy court is busy anyway. A client moved over to us recently from an advisor holding 120 individual stocks. No one person can follow 120 businesses. Going name by name, I’d guess 30% to 40% of them were dividend payers that only work because money cost 2% or 3%. When those companies refinance, nobody is coming to rescue them. They’ll be sold for parts. So I’m running everything we own through six tests: * EBIT covers interest less than 1.5 times, or less than once on a three-year basis. * Net debt above 4x EBITDA (6x for REITs and utilities). * More than 30% of debt floating, or more than 25% maturing by the end of 2028. * Negative free cash flow after dividends, two years running. * Marginal cost of debt above return on invested capital. * Share count growing more than 5% a year, or convertibles as the main funding source. The fifth test catches the business that only makes sense when money is cheap. There are always exceptions… Debt on its own isn’t the problem. Carvana was the poster child for a broken balance sheet in 2022. Today it’s at 1.0 times net debt to EBITDA, and in August it refinanced its 9% notes into a cheaper term loan. Debt plus improving unit economics works. Debt plus a model that needs 3% money doesn’t. AI at 8%… Parts of the AI buildout run the same borrow-to-build playbook at a much higher cost of capital. The best counterargument I read came from Gavin Baker at Atreides. Anthropic’s S-1 shows roughly $413 billion of non-cancellable commitments to its four biggest suppliers. That headline number is designed to scare people instead of inform them… Spread over the life of the contracts, it works out to about $31 billion a year of cloud spending, which a company at Anthropic’s revenue can pay for itself, plus around $161 billion at Broadcom that Broadcom and private credit will fund. Most of those contracts were also signed below today’s price for compute. His bigger point I agree with completely. Expensive money is good for this buildout. We’re short power, short chips and now short capital, and that’s what keeps it from turning into a bubble. Run this cycle with zero rates, TSMC tripling its capex and turbines on every shelf, and you get an overbuild. An overbuild is the worst outcome for investors and for everyone else. Slower and longer is better. Who’s spending So where does the money that isn’t stuck refinancing go? I’ve been working backwards from one assumption. If robotics is solved within a decade, manufactured goods get a lot cheaper. If that’s right, the smart way to spend discretionary dollars between now and then is on what stays scarce. My list keeps landing on travel, the Four Seasons, golf courses and real life. For Canadians the banks are the uncomfortable part. Financials are about a third of the TSX. Stripe says more than 86% of the Forbes AI 50 use it. The fastest-growing companies in the world aren’t building on big-bank infrastructure, and our banks need to decide what they’re going to offer those companies. Some will figure it out. Some won’t, and the market will price the difference. Three provinces over three weeks Quebec voted October 5th and elected a Parti Québécois minority on about 28% of the vote, the lowest share ever for a governing party in that province. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has promised a sovereignty referendum in his first term, though not before Trump leaves office. Alberta votes Monday. There are ten questions. Question ten, which sits first on the ballot, asks whether to start the legal process toward a binding vote on separation. Questions one to five deal with immigration, social programs and voter ID. Six to nine are about Ottawa: who appoints superior court judges, abolishing the Senate, opting out of federal programs with funding, and provincial law winning in provincial areas. Mel’s advice is worth repeating. Vote for what you actually want. Don’t vote strategically. If you want to send Ottawa a message without starting a separation process, questions six through nine are where that message goes. The surprise of the episode was how differently our two cities feel. I live in the most orange part of Edmonton, and social acceptance of separation there is zero. Mel says in Calgary she’s hearing people who sometimes vote NDP say they’ll vote to start the process. Neither of us is a pollster. But if the yes number comes in higher than people expect, that’s where it came from. BC votes October 24th. Eby called the election two years early, apparently hoping to catch a Conservative party that had just pushed out its leader. Polls have the Conservatives ahead anyway, under interim leader Lorne Doerkson. The NDP platform adds a 24.5% provincial bracket on income over $1 million starting in 2027. With federal tax on top, that’s a combined top rate of 57.5%, the highest in Canada and roughly even with Finland. Anecdotally, Lower Mainland developers I work with are already shopping for projects in Alberta. Then the courts. On October 9th the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled 4-1 that the federal Impact Assessment Act, even after Ottawa rewrote it following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision, still reaches into provincial jurisdiction. The court said it “creates great uncertainty.” Ottawa says it’s reviewing the decision. You can read that two ways. Federalism worked, because a court enforced the line. Or federalism failed, because it took a court, twice, to make a federal law fit the Constitution. For investors it lands in the same place. If separation threatens certainty, so does federal overreach. Capital doesn’t care which side the uncertainty comes from. The rest Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to seed Trump Accounts for kids, one of the largest gifts to children in history. On October 7th Susan Dell stood at the White House as they announced 10 million accounts funded. I went to two family dinners over Thanksgiving and the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was her face. Nobody could tell me what the money was for. Mel’s line on it was right: what you owe other people doesn’t change with their net worth. Ben Affleck sold his AI post-production company, InterPositive, to Netflix for about $587 million, then did a run of interviews where he explained the science and the math better than most of the people building this stuff. Good Will Hunting makes a lot more sense now. Meta released Muse Wonder on October 12th, its first model at the frontier. It scores 56 on the Artificial Analysis index, against 58 for Claude Opus 5.5. I use Muse every day, and it keeps making my house run better. My work conversations with Claude and ChatGPT have gotten sharper and less pleasant at the same time. David Sacks went after Anthropic this week for training Claude toward a “human-like self-conception.” Trump wants the government to call all of this “super intelligence.” I’d call it machine intelligence. These systems aren’t people, and building them to act like people is a mistake. The name you give something shapes how you treat it. That’s the episode. Take the question with you and run it on your mortgage, your rental, your portfolio and your business: does it work at 8%? If the answer is no, better to find out now than in 2029. Nothing here is investment advice. I own positions in some of the companies and sectors discussed and those positions change without notice. Do your own work. Sources * Market closes, October 13 (https://www.thestreet.com/stock-market-today/stock-market-today-dow-jones-sp-500-nasdaq-updates-oct-13-2026) * 10-year Treasury at its highest since 2002 (https://en.mercopress.com/2026/10/12/yields-on-key-us-treasury-bonds-reached-new-highs-but-for-the-10-year-demand-was-especially-strong/comments) * September FOMC minutes (https://www.babypips.com/news/headline-sept-fomc-minutes-support-hawkish-stance-2026-10-08) * JPMorgan Q3 2026 earnings call (https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/10/13/jpmorgan-chase-jpm-q3-2026-earnings-call-transcript/) * Delta’s premium revenue and the “$40 trillion” line (https://fortune.com/2026/10/14/delta-one-revamp-earnings-premium-cabin-top-40-trillion-richer/) * S&P Global: US bankruptcies at a 16-year high (https://www.cfodive.com/news/us-corporate-bankruptcies-hover-16-year-high-sp/825121) * KOSPI falls 5% on CXMT news (https://cdm.press/news/asia/2026/10/13/seouls-market-bleeds-kospi-crashes-over-5-percent-as-chip-giants-get-gutted/) * Canadian jobs data and Bank of Canada odds (https://www.kitco.com/news/off-the-wire/2026-10-09/canadian-dollar-hits-18-month-low-jobs-data-clips-rate-hike-bets) * Distressed office CMBS and refinancing failures (https://commercialobserver.com/?p=580672) * Carvana’s term loan refinancing (https://press.carvana.com/carvana-announces-successful-upsize-and-pricing-of-1-66b-senior-secured-term-loan-b-facility/) * CoreWeave bond yields (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/14/coreweave-stock-bond-yields-ai-debt.html) * Anthropic’s S-1 commitments (https://www.zawya.com/en/business/anthropics-518bln-ai-buildout-hinges-largely-on-deals-that-cannot-be-canceled-filing-shows-1392642) * Stripe and the Forbes AI 50 (https://stripe.com/en-no/use-cases/ai) * Alberta referendum questions (https://www.elections.ab.ca/elections/referendum/) * BC NDP tax platform (https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/david-eby-bc-ndp-higher-income-taxes-top-earners-platform) * Alberta Court of Appeal on the Impact Assessment Act (https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2026/10/09/alberta-court-of-appeal-says-ottawas-impact-assessment-act-is-still-unconstitutional/) * Susan Dell and the Trump Accounts event (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/susan-dell-pledge-appearance-backlash-trump-accounts-1824651) * Netflix buys InterPositive (https://forklog.com/en/netflix-acquires-ben-afflecks-ai-startup-for-587-million/) * Meta releases Muse Wonder (https://aiweekly.co/alerts/meta-releases-muse-wonder-its-first-frontier-class-ai-model) * David Sacks on Claude’s constitution (https://officechai.com/ai/david-sacks-explains-why-anthropic-hinting-at-ai-consciousness-in-claudes-constitution-is-dangerous/) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com (https://reformedmillennials.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   The Pacific Link to the Future

   Alberta filed its application for a West Coast oil pipeline on July 2nd 2026... It was designated a project of national interest this morning in Fort Mac. On Tuesday the Prime Minister stood in Vancouver and welcomed LNG Canada’s Phase 2 at Kitimat, a $33 billion final investment decision that doubles the facility and ranks as the second-largest single private investment in Canadian history. So inside one week this country said yes to a million barrels a day of oil heading south-west and a second helping of natural gas heading north-west. Meanwhile the most downloaded app in America is a robot from Meta that comes with its own computer. I called our Q3 client letter A Bridge to the Future, and after this week I think that should be changed to The Pacific Link to the future… One bridge is being built out of software and it runs through Menlo Park. The other is being built out of steel and gas turbines, and it runs from Bruderheim Alberta to Vancouvers Delta Port. MARKET Update: The Fed went on September 16th, a 12-0 vote taking the funds rate to 3.75% to 4%. First hike since 2023. The 10-year hit 5% on the 14th and was through 5.1% by the 23rd, the highest in nineteen years. That has done something strange to the market. The Nasdaq touched 27,000 this morning and sits roughly half a percent off all-time highs, but about 70% of its components are below their 50-day moving average. The equal-weight S&P, where Sherwin-Williams counts as much as Apple, is in a 17.5% drawdown. When money costs more, the companies that can raise it at the lowest spread get a tailwind and everyone else gets re-rated. The index looks fine because eight companies are fine. Underneath it, the broader economy is being repriced. I think we have a rough three or four weeks into the midterms and then a good finish to end the year… Uncertainty parks capital on the sidelines, and midterms manufacture uncertainty. Earnings have run well ahead of expectations this year while multiples contracted, which means the market got cheaper in 2026 even as it went up. The seven to nine months after a midterm is historically the best stretch of the four-year cycle. A bridge made of software Until this quarter, an AI was something you talked to. Muse is something that does things for you. The trick is simpler than it sounds. Meta gives every user their own computer, a real one running in Meta’s data centre, and the agent logs into it and works on your behalf with your calendar, your email, and your habits. An agent is just an AI with access to a computer. Before this year the only people who had that were engineers willing to wire it up themselves. Meta handed one to everybody on September 8th, and Microsoft did roughly the same thing for office workers on the 25th with a persistent Copilot agent called Autopilot that gets its own identity, memory and workspace inside your company’s Microsoft 365. An Anecdote from my life: I was sitting in the sauna with Adrianna and typed “book me a hair appointment tomorrow at Parlor Barbra.” It read my email, already knew who cuts my hair, checked my calendar and booked 3:40. One prompt. A few days earlier I asked it to sort out airport parking for a Seattle trip and it had already pulled my WestJet booking, the ninety-minute buffer and my plate number. Two prompts, fifteen seconds, replacing fifteen minutes of form filling. Then my son’s soccer registration failed on the league app. Muse flagged the email, I re-registered him, the schedule went into the calendar, and it sent the whole thing to Adrianna with a reminder to pack his socks and shoes. That last part matters more than the haircut. Mel made the point on the episode that the mental load of running a household has always been carried disproportionately by women, and the thing I noticed is that it didn’t get redistributed to me. It got lifted off both of us. Ben Thompson’s version is better than mine. He asked Muse to organize the recipes he’d saved on Instagram, and five minutes later he had a small custom app that categorized them. Nobody built that app. Nobody will ever sell it. It exists because one guy wanted it and the marginal cost of wanting is now about five minutes. His conclusion is that apps stop being destinations and become “mere suppliers,” and that the scarce thing moves from discovery to inspiration, which makes whoever owns the agent “the ultimate gatekeeper of not just user demand, but desire.” Google and Meta built the two best advertising businesses in history by solving discovery. Getting things done is about to be abundant. What stays scarce is the desire part of getting things done. Why Meta wins this even though its model isn’t the best. This is Clayton Christensen, straight out of the textbook. Once a product is good enough, the competition stops being about performance and starts being about convenience, and then distribution. Meta bet that a good-enough model inside a great product beats a great model inside a chat window. The labs with better models still do not have a consumer surface with this kind of lock-in, and there is almost nobody on earth with more distribution than Meta. It also finally explains the glasses, which were never a product so much as a delivery mechanism... The adoption numbers are worth being precise about, because I got them slightly wrong on the recording. Muse crossed five million downloads in twenty-two days per Sensor Tower. ChatGPT took fifty-six days to the same mark, Grok took 103, Claude took 492. It has held the top of the US App Store free iPhone chart for twelve straight days. And Meta has been spending its own house ad inventory on it, up to half of its daily impressions in the two weeks ending September 27th, which it has essentially never done for anything but Threads. Companies don’t put their own megaphone behind something until the retention data says it’s working. The tell that it’s real is that Amazon said no. On September 20th Amazon blocked Muse from shopping its site. Amazon’s advertising business did more than $68 billion last year, roughly double the profit of its retail operation, and an agent walking straight to checkout doesn’t look at a single sponsored placement. The next day Shopify opened checkout to Muse through Shop Pay. Walmart and Target have been backing an open agent-checkout standard with Google and Shopify. The incumbent with the most to protect pulls up the drawbridge. The challengers hold the door. That’s the same pattern as the second-place carriers signing with the iPhone, and it tells you more about where this is going than any demo. The distribution story is enormous. The bridge made of steel Pacific Link is 1,250 kilometres from Bruderheim to the coast near Delta, almost entirely along the Trans Mountain corridor, one million barrels a day, $35.2 to $43.7 billion. It is the first project listed under Schedule 1 of the Building Canada Act. Ownership lands at 45% Ottawa through Trans Mountain, 45% Alberta through the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, and 10% Pembina through construction with an option on up to another 10% at commercial operation. Indigenous communities are being offered a minimum 10%, financed through the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Programs. This is not a construction approval. Yet. The Major Projects Office and the Canada Energy Regulator have until September 1, 2027 to finalize conditions covering ownership, benefits, Indigenous rights, environmental protection and local hiring. The federal government is putting its own name and its own money on the timeline, which is a different thing from a press release. Speed is the resource. Alberta is not out-competing Virginia or Texas on access to capital. Capital is the one thing the world has plenty of. What Alberta can compete on is the willingness to say yes quickly, and ninety-one days from application to designation is not a normal number on this continent. The metric to guard from here is months from application to shovel. If that number holds, everything else falls in line. Egress is the oldest problem we have. Anyone who managed money through 2018 remembers what happens when production outruns pipe. The differential blows out, and royalties and cash flow evaporate into a discount that gets captured by somebody in Oklahoma. Pacific Link is roughly a 20% increase in Canadian crude export capacity pointed at Asia instead of Cushing. Now add the gas. Coastal GasLink currently moves about 2.1 bcf a day, and its Phase 2 nearly doubles that with five new compressor stations on the existing 670-kilometre route, construction starting early 2027. LNG Canada goes from 14 million tonnes a year to 28. In the Alberta essay I argued that one gigawatt of data centre burns roughly 160 million cubic feet a day, and that five campuses would be about half an LNG Canada of brand new demand with no coastal pipe required at all. This is the best demand picture western Canadian gas has had in my career. The caveats. * Indigenous consultation is the real risk. The equity piece is genuinely better than most expected: a minimum 10% stake with loan guarantees. But more than 130 communities sit along this route, several B.C. chiefs have said publicly that a two-month consultation window was not adequate, and the duty to consult is not satisfied by an ownership offer. That is where the court risk is, and an ownership stake and a legal challenge can absolutely coexist. * Labour is the other one. Pacific Link, Pathways, the Kitimat expansion, the Meta campus and the Sturgeon County power build are all going to bid for the same electricians, welders, pipefitters and power engineers in the early 2030s. Wages in those trades are going to do what oilfield wages did in 2006. That’s wonderful if you’re on the tools and painful if you’re the one pricing a fixed-cost contract three years out. * And the politics are not subtle. Alberta votes on independence October 19th, B.C. goes to the polls October 24th, and this landed on October 1st. Where the money actually goes. The commodity gets the headlines, the infrastructure gets the early returns, and the services get the multiples. The people who win quietly are the lawyer, the appraiser, the electrician and the accountant in Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan and Sturgeon County, because that is how a megaproject’s money actually reaches the people. As a 36-year-old Albertan, the version of this I’m most interested in isn’t the barrel at all. It’s the part where we stop shipping the molecule away and start burning it here to make compute. Sources And Links * PMO: Pacific Link listed as a project of national interest (https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/10/01/prime-minister-carney-lists-west-coast-oil-pipeline-now-known-pacific) * Pembina Pipeline: Pacific Link listing and ownership terms (https://www.pembina.com/media-centre/news/details/5f39e30a-8733-4e09-8905-371af63088f9) * Timeline for Pacific Link, including the July 2 application and cost range (https://lethbridgeherald.com/news/national-news/2026/10/01/a-timeline-for-pacific-link-the-national-interest-alberta-b-c-pipeline-plan/) * First Nations leaders on the consultation window (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/first-nations-west-coast-oil-pipeline-duty-to-consult-9.7274390) * PMO: LNG Canada Phase 2 (https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/09/29/prime-minister-carney-welcomes-lng-canada-phase-2-second-largest) * Shell FID to double LNG Canada capacity (https://www.ogj.com/pipelines-transportation/lng/news/55408348/shell-takes-fid-to-double-lng-canada-capacity) * TC Energy: Coastal GasLink Phase 2 (https://www.stocktitan.net/news/TRP/coastal-gas-link-phase-2-to-proceed-following-lng-canada-final-frbk1fiyqi2n.html) * TechCrunch: Meta debuts Muse (https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/meta-debuts-its-muse-ai-agent-will-consumers-trust-it/) * Muse download pace vs ChatGPT, Grok and Claude (https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/meta-ai/articles/metas-muse-ai-agent-hits-120430566.html) * Amazon blocks Muse, Shopify opens checkout (https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/amazon-blocks-metas-muse-shopify-191300313.html) * Ben Thompson, Apps, Agents, and Aggregation (https://stratechery.com/2026/apps-agents-and-aggregation/) * Microsoft’s Copilot revamp and the Autopilot agent (https://venturebeat.com/technology/microsoft-revamps-its-copilot-ai-with-a-persistent-autopilot-agent-and-hosting-for-ai-generated-apps) * Tech leaders sign the White House AI accord (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/29/trump-top-tech-firms-sign-accord-to-self-police-ai-development) * Fed raises rates to 3.75%-4% (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/16/fed-rate-decision-september-2026.html) * 10-year Treasury yield through 5% (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/14/10-year-us-treasury-is-closing-in-on-5percent.html) * Arm, Intel and AMD rally on the Muse launch (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/arm-surges-13-meta-muse-152410038.html) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com (https://reformedmillennials.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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